Security

After maintaining for three years that Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan, was so grave a threat to the United States that merely permitting him to meet with his lawyer would fatally compromise national security, the Bush Administration (having been told by Justice Antonin Scalia that “the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive”) declined to defend its case against Hamdi in open court and announced that he will be stripped of his citizenship and released in Saudi Arabia.Boston Globe, …

The Taliban surrendered Kandahar, the last Afghan city under its control, to a loose confederation of warlords, who immediately began fighting among themselves and looting stores. Afghan refugees, particularly children, were dying in great numbers; Uzbekistan finally agreed to allow humanitarian aid to cross its border at the “Friendship Bridge.” The CIA asked Pakistan for help in finding Osama bin Laden, whose mother told a Saudi newspaper that she was disappointed in her son. Mullah Omar was still at large. The White House issued a holiday terror-strike warning. Attorney General John Ashcroft testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had …

A newspaper review of the ballots cast in Florida’s presidential election found that Al Gore probably received more votes than George W. Bush, who this week signed an executive order that will permit the government to use military courts to try foreigners accused of terrorism. Bush’s action was widely denounced as dictatorial and un-American, and law professors speculated that the administration was afraid that the evidence against Osama bin Laden was too weak to hold up in court. Vice President Dick Cheney said that suspected terrorists “don’t deserve to be treated as a prisoner of war. They don’t deserve the …

Attorney General John Ashcroft approved a new emergency policy that will allow the government to monitor conversations between federal prisoners and their lawyers and to read such mail. The president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers denounced the policy as “an abomination” that violates the Sixth Amendment right to an attorney. The government said it would no longer issue a running tally of the number of people arrested in its investigation of the September 11attacks. At last count, 1,182 people had been detained; the Justice Department has refused to say who is being held, under what charges, or …

President George W. Bush signed an executive order that will allow him to block the release of 68,000 pages of Ronald Reagan’s presidential papers and to retain control of his own documents, which are supposed to be released 12 years after he leaves office; there was speculation that the president wishes to avoid embarrassing his father and other former Reagan officials who work in the current administration. Robert S. Mueller III, director of the FBI, admitted that he had no idea who was sending anthrax through the mail and appealed to ordinary Americans to help figure it out: “If you …

Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, a major antiterrorism bill that will greatly increase the power of the federal government to spy on citizens and potential terrorists. Senator Russell Feingold cast the only dissenting vote in the Senate; he argued that the bill’s language was too vague and would allow unconstitutional searches. President Bush said the bill would protect constitutional rights while “preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones.” American planes again bombed and this time destroyed the Red Cross complex in Kabul. One plane that had been ordered to bomb the complex missed and instead hit …

"When Matti invited me on a tour of the neighborhood, I asked about security. 'The message has already been passed to ISIS that you’re here,' he said. 'But don’t worry. I guarantee I could bring even you in and out of the Islamic State.'"

"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis."